Rising Sea Levels & Heritage: Meeting the Challenges in Sarasota

Sarasota and hurricanes: there is a myth that Sarasota is protected from hurricanes, whether by ancient Native Americans and their continual presence in burials and mounds or by some associated with the Ringling circus. Yet nothing stops hurricanes from coming to the shores of Sarasota Bay: we have historical accounts of hurricanes and, within the last year, residents went through the loss of power and school closures after Hurricane Irma in September 2017 and can see the erosion at Lido Beach caused by the May 2018 Tropical Storm Alberto do much damage. Unlike the ancient days or even the 1920s, there are many more people living on the coast today and the infrastructure is a tremendous material investment whose disruption changes our lives.

Flooding of our streets and neighborhoods, the fear of hurricanes, and changing weather patterns are in the news and becoming more and more a pressing concern for real estate, local governments, and the pursuit of happiness in the USA. Florida is one of the places around the planet most threatened by rising sea levels and the concerns are especially acute across its coastline. The time to warn about climate change is over: building up community resilience is a necessity for us and our children and grandchildren in what some archaeologists are labeling the Anthropocene, a geological time period centered by human activities which is replacing the Holocene (the last ten thousand years). We are in a new era, one that needs new approaches to climate and our shoreline. A central challenge and opportunity comes from archaeology and history: especially on Gulf Coast Florida, heritage sites are near the water and threatened by episodic storm surge and long-term rising sea levels.

We talk about rising sea levels but the sea is not level. It is a simple observation but significant when we discuss the contentious politics of rise level rise. The rise in the seas, the movement of the waters onto land, is not even because the sea is not level (after all, the world is round). The unevenness is both a point of departure and a reason the implications of sea level rise, globally, are uneven. It might be a surprise to visitors and even residents but one of the crisis locations for rising sea levels is Florida. Researchers of climate change are paying close attention to Florida because this state is surrounded by water and has so little elevation. As a global city Miami has been receiving the most attention; our communities on the Florida Gulf Coast have similar challenges for sustaining the current coastline with its residences, business, leisure activities, and heritage. There are many, many discussions about the ecology and the changing environment, the plants and animals are part of our natural heritage; in August, archaeologists and others are coming together to focus on cultural heritage and rising sea levels.

Heritage sites can teach us about climate change and heritage managers are planning what to protect and what will be washed away. Combining heritage sites as sources of insights and protecting the places is being increasingly important. How those decisions are being made and who will be making them as the climate crisis worsens are good questions to ask. Archaeologists, environmentalists, business owners, real estate professionals, government staff and policy makers, and interested citizens are invited to Tidally United, being held in Sarasota on August 9th through 11th and co-organized by the New College Public Archaeology Lab and the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN)

Tidally United is a project of the Florida Public Archaeology Network whose mission is: “To promote and facilitate the stewardship, public appreciation, and value of Florida's archaeological heritage through regional centers, partnerships, and community engagement.” FPAN has three core areas: Public Outreach, Assistance to Local Governments, and Assistance to the Florida Division of Historical Resources. To meet those goals in an age of rising sea, FPAN started Tidally United in 2016. The first Tidally United was held in St. Augustine and focused on Cultural Resources Shoreline Monitoring and Public Engagement Summit; the second, in Fort Lauderdale, highlighted indigenous groups and climate science, planning, and the importance of cultural heritage. For Sarasota, the gathering is co-organized by the New College Public Archaeology Lab and its theme is Heritage as Social Action.

Heritage is not just places and things from the past, heritage is the legacies from the past that we commemorate, share, and retell for visions of our future. The New College Public Archaeology Lab, founded in 2010, has taken undergraduates into the communities of Sarasota and Manatee counties for archaeological, ethnographic, and historical projects, worked with community groups to recover material evidence of ancient and near recent histories, and present the past in innovative representations for school children and the public. Whether a terrestrial survey by the PaleoIndian (more than 12,000 years ago) site of Little Salt Spring the Manasota-period (2500-1300 years before present) midden at Phillippi Estate Park, the early 19th century maroon community of Angola by the Manatee Mineral Spring, or the 1920s Venice Train Depot, the future of the heritage locales of Sarasota/Manatee intersect with rising sea levels.

The August 9th-11th Tidally United conference starts with a free, open to the public presentation at Mildred Sainer Pavilion on the New College of Florida campus. For a dialogue on heritage, Vickie Oldham, Founder & Project Director for both Looking for Angola (the public anthropology program that located material traces of an early 19th century maroon community on the Manatee River) and Newtown Alive (the community-based historic preservation program for Black Sarasota) will be joined by Uzi Baram, Professor of Anthropology at New College of Florida and founding Director of the New College Public Archaeology Lab. Focusing on heritage work in Newtown, Sarasota, the presentation will describe how heritage matters for Sarasota and how heritage is under stress, stress from those who forgot or want to forget the past, from development that replaces the historic with the new, and from rising sea levels. Focusing on the challenges from the sea for Sarasota and Manatee counties, the dialogue will explore the opportunities created by engaged heritage work and the implications of storm surge, increasingly powerful hurricanes, and rising sea levels locally and globally on material heritage for immediate concerns and on the long-term implications for future generations.

On Friday, August 10th Tidally United moves to the Payne Park Auditorium, starting at 8:30 am. Please register and pay the $40.00 fee for lunch, snacks, and swag (and defer the costs of the venues). The day starts with a welcome by the Director of Sarasota County Historical Resources and an overview of the archaeology of Sarasota/Manatee, and then we have a fantastic keynote speech by Florida State University Professor Jesse Halligan on underwater archaeology in Florida. Panels of leading experts, local and from across Florida, will address Planning and Practice as well as Public Connections; FPAN will demonstrate the work of Heritage Scouts – a citizen science initiative gaining support across the state and receiving global attention- and discussion will focus on solutions to the challenges of rising sea levels for archaeology. Short (five slides in five minutes) lightning sessions will include new findings from the work of Winslow Homer, Mote Marine’s innovative efforts on localized sustainable fisheries, and the insights from the archaeology of Little Salt Spring. Since the solutions need to be put into practice, we invited candidates for political office to come to a forum to close out the day.

For those who registered, on Saturday we will meet at Historic Spanish Point to see the challenges to archaeological historic sites from rising sea levels and participate in demonstrations of how to document and address the concerns for the past today.

Tidally United will generate frameworks for solutions to the challenges of rising sea levels and encourage long-term engagement with protecting and learning from the archaeology and heritage on our shores.

For more information and to register, see https://fpan.us/projects/tidally.php

For information on FPAN, see http://fpan.us/ and on NCPAL, see https://www.ncf.edu/about/our-campus/special-programs/public-archaeology-lab-pal/

A Few Recent Publications on heritage and rising sea levels:

Uzi Baram 2017 Climatic Amnesias: Sarasota and Its Stormy Folklore. Time Sifters Archaeological Society Newsletter, October.

Cynthia Barnett 2015 Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. Crown Publishing, New York

Eric P. Chassignet, James W. Jones, Vasubandhu Misra, and Jaynatha Obeysekera, editors, 2017 Florida’s Climate: Changes, Variations, and Impacts. Florida Climate Institute, Gainesville

Jennifer M. Collins,‎ Robert V. Rohli,‎ and Charles H. Paxton 2017 Florida Weather and Climate: More Than Just Sunshine. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Jack E. Davis 2017 The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York.

Amitav Ghosh 2016 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Albert C. Hine, Don P. Chambers, Tonya D. Clayton, Mark R. Hafen, and Gary T. Mitchum 2016 Sea Level Rise in Florida: Science, Impacts, and Options. University Press of Florida

David Malakoff 2018 Rethinking Shell Middens. American Archaeology 21(1) https://www.archaeologicalconservancy.org/rethinking-shell-middens/

Robert van de Noort 2013 Climate Change Archaeology: Building Resilience from Research in the World’s Coastal Wetlands. Oxford University Press, New York.

Marcy Rockman, Marissa Morgan, Sonya Ziaja, George Hambrecht, and Alison Meadow. 2016 Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. Washington, DC: Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science and Climate Change Response Program, National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/c...

Kenneth Sassaman, N. J. Wallis, P. M. McFadden. G. J. Mahar, J. A. Jenkins, M. C. Donop, M. P. Monés, A. Palmiotto, A. Boucher. J. M. Goodwin, C. I. Oliveira 2017 Keeping Pace with Rising Sea: The First Six Years of the Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey. Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 12:173-199.

Margo Schwardon 2016 Research Design for Climate Change Response: Archaeological Survey of De Soto National Memorial, Florida. Southeast Archaeological Center. SEAC Assession No. 2827